By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

SPARTA, Mich. — People in the apple industry are pointing the finger at Michigan’s governor and blaming her for budget cuts they say are hurting their growing business.

Recently apple packers have missed out on sales or been faced with fines from the USDA because they couldn’t get their apple shipments inspected on time. The bottleneck seems to be at the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA), where budget cuts have reduced the number of fruit and vegetable inspectors to six, with only two of those being certified to inspect apples.

Michigan is third in the country in apple production, behind only New York and Washington state. There are 950 apple growers in Michigan, according to Denise Donahue, executive director of the Michigan Apple Committee (MAC).

“This is an example of where the wheels are coming off the MDA,” Donahue said. “You can cut out some fat, but this administration has gone overboard.”

She said growers can’t send apples out of the country without the MDA inspecting them and without a sanitary certificate. Although apples that end up at Kroger or another grocery store in the United States don’t have to go through the same inspection regime, the amount of exports is rising. Donahue said she expects 6 percent of Michigan’s apple crop to be exported this year compared to the usual 4 percent.

“We have a very big apple crop this year,” Donahue said. “That may be part of the problem.”

Ken Rauscher, director of MDA’s Pesticide and Plant Pest Management Division, agreed with Donahue’s main points.
“The reality is that we’ve suffered loss of staff over the years due to budget cuts,” Rauscher said. “We also had a very large apple crop last year and we’re reaching a point where we need to move those. We had a big demand for grading because of an order of apples for the national school lunch program.”

In one of its recent weekly reports, the Michigan Farm Bureau complained that a grower lost $50,000 recently because an apple inspector was on a furlough day on Friday and couldn’t work on the next day because of union rules. It also stated an apple shipper, which turned out to be River Ridge Produce Marketing, complained of losing $143,000 so far this year because it couldn’t get apples inspected.

Pam Schwallier, a longtime sales associate at River Ridge, confirmed that these incidents really happened and she said they will probably continue to happen without more inspectors. She said that, although the industry pays for most if not all of the cost of apple inspections, inspectors must still be employed by the MDA as part of a cooperative agreement the state has with the USDA. MDA’s inspectors are considered independent, third party inspectors and therefore must be a part of the state’s export program, she said.

Schwallier said six loads of USDA apples were late being shipped out, in this instance to Florida, and normally would have resulted in a fine from the USDA. She said they were able to get a waiver this time. At about the same time, on March 12 and 13, loads of apples that were due to be exported ended up not being exported due to a lack of inspectors.

“There’s been quite a lot of dismay at our office about the inspections. Cutting these programs just annihilates the industry,” Schwallier said. “Michigan needs to expand its export program to get into these other countries.”

“Clearly, it’s not something that we want to have happen,” Rauscher said of the incidents. “Yes, we’re apologetic about it. A number of people have tried to draw attention to the need for more support for agriculture. We work really hard to meet the needs of the fruit and vegetable industry, but with the budget cuts we’re just getting to the point where we can’t meet all of the demand.”